I don’t think enough attention has been paid to one of the truly most remarkable aspects of President Donald Trump: his aversion to war.
This turns traditional American politics on its head: the Republicans have almost always, in my lifetime, represented the party of military aggression. The party that was eager to send the marines in whenever American foreign interests (usually oil) are threatened, or whenever there was an opportunity to install a friendly proxy administration somewhere. Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait. The U. S. had limited involvement (mainly equipment supplies but with some troops) in Algeria, Burkina Faso, Mali, Morocco, Niger, Senegal, and Tunisia. You never heard about these? There’s a reason for that. The government generally would prefer you not to be too concerned about these secret interventions because they think you may not appreciate the necessity of subterfuge in the process of keeping Americans safe.
Or you may not believe these activities are actually keeping you safe.
To be fair, there have also been the occasional intervention on humanitarian grounds, as in Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia.
But Trump is different. He conspicuously speaks out against war. He is representative of American disillusionment with overseas interventions, coloured by the fiascos in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and now Ukraine.
This is progress of sorts. He still seems to like the idea of using aggressive threats to get his way and he has bombed the Houthis in Yemen, but he has taken very few steps to actually involve the military in any kind of real intervention. (The bombing of targets in Yemen has not, so far, deterred the Houthis from attacking targets in Israel). He is actually taking a page out of Obama’s playbook (though he would deny it vehemently) and initiated negotiations with Iran (to the consternation of Netanyahu in Israel).
When you consider the fact that the mighty U. S. of A. couldn’t defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan, this may be a wise development.